It's About Time You Knew the Truth

Issue #4

Author

Jocelyn Harper
November 14, 2022

A newsletter header image with pale yellow background adorned with pink and yellow black outlined donates with sprinkles. The text says, "Git Cute Newsletter" in bold pink font and the subtitle in uppercase, black lettering says "It's about time you knew the truth."

(Have you been forwarded this email?)

I feel like a 'hello' isn't enough to suffice for the opening of this email.

It has been the longest week of 2022 I am certain of it. I hope that all of you are taking care of yourselves and most importantly being kind. Kind to yourself, kind to others, kind to pervasive thoughts and temptation.

Updates

  • I have recorded the very first episode of Git Cute Podcast with one of my favorite people - Kurt Kemple! It was such a fun conversation, and Kurt is just one of the best humans I have ever had the pleasure to meet and call a friend. I am in the process of editing it and trying to decide if I want to keep it strictly to Patreon subscribers or release the audio version on the normal RSS feed and do an outtake version for Patreon readers as well. This experimentation with the podcast will more than likely change episode to episode. Either way, it is available now for Patreon members.

  • The progress on Conquer System Design is moving slowly, albeit moving. I am not sure what my mental block on this course is coming from, but I know that I need to have the visuals and content down pat before I release it. I think it's coming from a place of professionalism and perfectionism, but sometimes you need to just release it quickly and iterate on the edits, right? 🥲 You can still take advatnage of the preorder price below.

  • Thanks to some a great conversation with my dear friend Scott, I have next step interviews with a couple of places that interest me and seem like they are really interesting in terms of work and meet the criteria that I look for in terms of a team, org, and company. We will see how they go, but after writing this email, I am going to be brushing up on my algorithms immediately! (Again. And again.)

  • The publishing process of A Software Engineer's Guide to Seniority is moving with a slight setback! During the typecasting process, it looks like that I am a few pages short of what I was contracted, so it's back to writing extra for this book! It's a great opportunity for me to expand on subjects that I felt I couldn't when I was publishing it myself, so I am very excited to see what the final outcome will be. I've already seen the cover, and I am in *love* with it. I can't wait to share it with you all!

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The Facade of Tech Toxicity is Breaking

Email heading banner of a cracked television screen where the television is still lit and there are sporadic lines of color varying from red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

With Elon Musk's acquisiton of Twitter, a few things have become apparent to a subset of people that were not aware of it before. Musk has shown that he is not competent at running a technology company and that the senior management at Twitter could allegedly be complacent with it.

On November 12th, a Tweet crossed my timeline that I could not ignore from William Pietri.

Screenshot of Tweet from @williampietri that reads "I want to dig in for a bit on this set of Slack replies from a Twitter manager talking about undoing some of the layoffs." The screenshot of the Slack messages from Luke Simon, Senior Director at Twitter reads, "This is going ot be the challenge. The engineers I am bringing back are weak, lazy, unmotivated, and they may even be against an Elon Twitter. They were cut for a reason. So we need to think of these people as just needing to be around until the knowledge transition is completed."

Tech Twitter lit up with a ferocity that I have only seldom seen when discussing if people with software engineering degrees were better engineers. There were many of us that took this information and decided to inform the rest of the world that this is not how anyone should be talking about their employees. The irony is not lost on me that htese people were let go, yet these "weak, lazy, unmotivated" workers are the ones that they need to keep the app running.

My first reaction to the news was to find his Twitter. There is nothing that sets my tech activism fire ablaze than white men in tech treating employees poorly. By the time I got to it, he had already locked it down. (I won't link it here, but it isn't hard to find considering the information in the above graphic.) The damage had already been done. Many of my friends annd colleagues had already started calling this man out for his atrocious behavior. Will anything be done about this behavior? Considering the number of lawsuits that his direct boss's other companies are going through, I doubt it.

I have been speaking out about the toxicity within the tech industry since I become a software engineer, but this is one of the first examples that we got into the mindset behind senior management about how they feel about their engineers. I even spoke in last week's newsletter about how tech employees had a rude awakening about how temporary we are in our positions. And we are watching it play out in real time.

Links That Made Me Happy

Some of these link may be affiliate links for me, but no one mentioned has told or paid me to mention their products. If you do not wish to use them, you don't have to!

Java Facts

Did you know that Java has automatic garbage collection? Yeah, that's right. We don't have to worry about memory management because the JVM has automatic garbage collection for objects that it knows are no longer in use. Pretty cool, huh?

Thank you to Stephon for becoming a Git Cute Patron! If you want a shoutout in the newsletter, you can sign up here.

Have an amazing week and please be kind to yourself.

xx Josie